Dublin demands legacy inquests while IRA victims get no justice

No justice for IRA atrocities, such as the Birmingham pub bombing, above

Published:00:18Friday 30 December 2016

Ben Lowry goes to the heart of the matter (December 10) in warning that Sinn Fein wishes to promote the so-called ‘legacy inquests’ to denigrate the British Army and the RUC while IRA terrorists hide behind a code of Omerta to stay silent about their past crimes.

Letters to editor

Can anyone imagine circumstances in which members of the Kingsmills Einsatzgruppen will ever be arrested and reported for prosecution?

(The Einsatzgruppen were special SS units which followed the German Army into Russia in June 1941, rounded up the Jewish population in the towns and villages and mudered them in Kingsmills-style operations).

And, of course, there is still no justice for the victims of other IRA atrocities like the Birmingham and Omagh bombings.

The Irish foreign minister Charles Flanagan has been stepping up the pressure, in typical anti-British fashion, at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg for progress on “legacy inquests”.

Dublin has “form”, as they say, in this context.

On June 17 1940, two weeks after Dunkirk, Joe Walshe, Eire’s secretary for external affairs, met the Nazi ambassador to Dublin, Eduard Hempel and “expressed great adminration for the German achievements”.

Hempel reported back to Berlin.

It is worth recording that the German “achievements”, so much admirded by Walshe, had resulted in the deaths of over 120,000 Allied soldiers.

If Flanagan and his cohorts are so keen on legacy inquests they might refresh themselves on the conduct of the Irish Free State Armay in dealing with the IRA in 1922/23 including the norotious Ballyseedy incident in Co Cork.

It is a simple fact that the legal system, which is grounded on process, precision, precedent and paper trails finds it almost impossible to deal with a Mafia-type organisation like the IRA.

The actions of the security forces were under constant, and often hostile, scrutiny.

Which explains why, as Ben Lowry points out, “how few known IRA fanatics were killed by the state and how its leaders were routinely acquitted by courts”.